Three years ago, I turned into a workaholic. The worst part is, it happened by choice. It all began when I was thrusted into a particularly problematic project. (Which project isn't, right? Yeah... I know. Ok. Forget that you ever read this sentence)
It started by saying the following phrase, "I will only be a workaholic for three months. After three months, that's it. I will go to Cambodia, or Laos, or Tibet."
Somehow, three months turned into six months, nine months, twelve months and eventually thirty six months.
Being a workaholic, is the worst thing that could happen to an individual. You think about your work day and night. You are always working towards deadlines that are due in a few days, working for deadlines that has already past, and working towards foreseen deadlines. Your mind is constantly thinking: How do I solve this problem? How to I improve this situation? What else can I do to make things better?
Your brains and fingers are active 24/7. From the moment you wake up, 'til the moment you head falls on the pillow. At night, you'll suffer from insomnia. You just can't go to sleep because your mind is thinking about the next exciting meeting or workshop that's going to take place the next day. Sometimes, you'd wake up in the middle of the night, when an inspiration comes, and you just have to write the 'brilliant' idea down, just in case it slipped your mind when you awoke.
One fine day, I looked up from my keyboard, and I realized that I had lost my friends, my life and my soul.
In most cases, when workaholics realized that it's getting too much, they jump out of the hot pot into freezing cold water. Some opt to take a sabbatical leave. Some choose a less demanding project. Some choose a different job altogether. Not me. To top it all off, I loved my job too much. It was exactly what I required. It demanded constant studying, reading of journals, writing reports, travelling, communicating with professionals and teaching others. All of which I loved tremendously. Nowhere else in other disciplines, can I find such a fulfilling job. Every second was eagerly filled with an insatiable thirst to gain new experience and theories. It's constantly filled with a rush of adrenaline that fuels me with something to look forward to each and every day. Hence, even when there came a chance to opt out, I stayed. So much so that I somewhere along the way, I lost sight of everything.
My family, thankfully, stuck with me through thick and thin. My parents knew they were losing their daughter to a poisonous thing called 'work'. They jerked me, shook me, quarantined me, poured cold and hot water over me simultaneously, but it just didn't work. My brother on the other hand, used a more subtle approach. He cared, he supported in every possible way when I was stuck in the lurch. One friend lent a faithful listening ear. Another offered advice on how to speed up my work. Another encouraged it by offering her own insight. It always worked, only for a few minutes, days or hours and immediatey after, I'd be back on the keyboard, clicking here and there.
One time, it became so bad that I realized that I was in deep trouble. Now, not only I lost my sleep and my hair, I also began sending mails at 3am or 4am! So much so that I decided to join Workaholics Annonymous. Sadly, this organization is only available in the US. So, what was I going to do? It was then I decided to something intangible, a long forgotten idea known as God. Things did improve eventually, but I was still hooked to my work - to a lesser extent.
As such, when the heat was too high, when the stress level was too much to bear, I'd always imagine myself flying up in the hot air balloon. Heard of the phrase? 'Up, up and away'? Yeah... to me, I just had to fly away from everything, as far away as possible. The only way? Was to ride in a hot air balloon. Yet, in Malaysia, there's nothing like that. At most, there was hang-gliding. But most of the time, the wind just wasn't strong enough.
And so, when I found out that hot air balloon rides were available in Al-Ain, I seized it. I just had to take it up to fulfill one of my innermost desires.
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